Manual check-ins, flight delays: Chaos reigns supreme at Indian airports

Nearly 1,100 flights delayed, over 100 cancelled across Delhi, Mumbai, B'luru

A global outage of Microsoft's apps and services on Friday severely affected the operations of Indian carriers, prompting manual check-ins at airports and resulting in hundreds of flight delays and cancellations across the country. IndiGo, India's largest carrier, said it had to cancel at least 192 flights on Friday and Saturday.

The ground staff at check-in counters across Indian airports resorted to issuing handwritten boarding passes to passengers due to this issue.

The digital display boards at airports went blank, prompting staff to prepare and update flight information manually on whiteboards to keep travelers informed, according to airline officials. By Friday evening, the systems had largely come back online, but the aftereffects persisted.

According to flightradar24, 485 flights (331 departures and 154 arrivals) faced delays on Friday at the Delhi International Airport. India's busiest airport, which handles about 1,260 daily scheduled flights, cancelled at least 46 departures on Friday. Delhi International Airport Limited, which manages the airport, said it is working with all "stakeholders" to minimise inconvenience to flyers.

Sanjiv Kapoor, executive vice-president (strategies) of Saudia Airlines, was at the Delhi airport on Friday afternoon.

He wrote on X: "Due to a major global system outage, all gate screens at DEL (Delhi airport) are blank. Flights are being held at the gate. Some gates boarding pax (passengers) and holding on board, some flights holding pax at gate itself, which is better. Seems to be impacting many airports and airlines."

Mumbai International Airport, India's second busiest, was also affected. A total of 431 flights (284 departures and 147 arrivals) faced delays on Friday. The Mumbai airport handles about 870 daily scheduled flights. At least 30 departures on Friday were cancelled at the Mumbai airport. 

The civil aviation minister Rammohan Naidu said that "manual methods" are being used at airports across India to ensure minimal disruption due to the "global Microsoft cloud outage".

"I have directed airport authorities and airlines to be compassionate and provide extra seating, water, and food for passengers affected by delays," he added. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and the Ministry of Civil Aviation are closely monitoring the situation.

Microsoft said on X that the company is investigating an issue impacting its users' ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services.

It said that the preliminary cause for this disruption was a configuration change that was done "in a portion of our Azure backend workloads", which resulted in connectivity failures that affected downstream Microsoft 365 services dependent on these connections. Azure is Microsoft’s Cloud computing platform.

IndiGo said that the outage has "severely" disrupted its operations. "Following rapid steps taken by IndiGo teams, to switch to manual/backup systems, operations at major Indian airports including Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore are now under control amidst the widespread disruptions caused by the software outage. IndiGo has activated ‘war rooms’ at four metro airports to manage operations," it noted.

It said the airline has asked customers, whose flights have been cancelled, to not reach airports. These customers have been offered "alternate means where possible". 

SpiceJet said it was experiencing technical challenges with its "service provider", affecting online services including booking and check-in functionalities. "As a result, we have activated manual check-in and boarding processes across airports," it added.

Akasa Air said that due to infrastructure issues with its "service provider", some of its online services, including booking and check-in services will be temporarily unavailable. "Currently we are following manual check-in and boarding processes at the airports and hence request passengers with immediate travel plans to reach the airport early to check-in at our counters," it added.

Vistara added that it was experiencing technical challenges across various aspects of its operations due to a global outage at its "service provider's end".

According to flightradar24, a total of 243 flights (159 departures and 84 arrivals) faced delays on Friday at the Bengaluru International Airport, which handles about 690 daily scheduled flights.